CBS News contributor Michio Kaku, a physics professor at the City University of New York: It is scandalous [...] we’re leaking nuclear waste dating all the way back to the Nagaski bomb [...]

A toxic witches brew of chemicals, the most dangerous known to science like plutonium, enriched uranium, nitric acid and solvents. [...] We have 56 million gallons worth of this toxic stuff. To get this into perspective, to get your head around this, imagine 80 Olympic-sized swimming pools containing the most toxic substance known to science of which two Olympic-size swimming pools have leaked right into the ground and eventually into the water table and, perhaps, even into people’s drinking water.

We have to immediate realize that this is a major emergency problem. The government promised 10 years ago that it’s under control. Now we realize it’s not. They have to take the waste, put it into new vats that are double, triple lined. They have to drill to assess how far the waste is. And it’s a ticking time bomb. In 15, 50 years — we don’t know when — it’s going to hit the ground table. When it hits the ground table, it will go right into the Columbia River, and remember, that’s one of the major rivers in the entire Pacific Northwest.

"In 15, 50 years — we don’t know when — it’s going to hit the ground table. When it hits the ground table, it will go right into the Columbia River…"

What a jerk. It's been leaking into the Columbia River since the late '40's:

"As historian Michelle Gerber writes in On the Home Front: The Cold War Legacy of the Hanford Nuclear Site, "In 1959, Hanford biologists reported that the number of chinook salmon spawning in the vicinity was only about 19 percent of 1958." Gerber adds that nearby towns along the Columbia were also affected, "In mid-1947, river water at Pasco and sanitary (city) water at Kennewick first showed detectable levels of gross beta-emitting radiation…Values in the river water at Richland were even higher, reaching up to four times that at Pasco by late 1948.""

Wow. Great work exposing Kaku as a paid shill for the nuclear industry. Who would have thought? Besides that, he needs a haircut.

But then again, he was talking about drilling inspection wells so they could map the latest underground plume of high-level waste so we would know for sure where exactly it was and when it would hit the river.

Your link to Joshua Frank's article is specifically about Reactor B and the nearly boiling hot plutonium pellet cooling water that had been discharged directly into the Columbia River for years during and after the war. They didn't put that in the tanks – they needed tons of it a day. That was the primary source of the river contamination back then.

They had a few above-ground waste tanks back then but eventually ran out of room and started building the tank graves. Those presumably were not leaking right after they were built, but I'm skeptical that they even lasted their 20-year engineered lifetime.

Nonetheless, Kaku wasn't suggesting they never leaked and the groundwater was never polluted until now. He's simply saying that we can't wait around for Bechtel to build their questionable magic glass machine to do something about the immediate problem. Nobody want's to pay for the underground plume mapping now because they were hoping Bechtel's contraption would be working. Nobody is even thinking about it – when they do, it will be a two-year debate over who pays.

"The Washington Department of Ecology (Ecology) is re-issuing a permit that allows the U.S. Department of Energy (Energy) to dump millions of gallons of maintenance and construction wastewater, cooling water, condensate, and industrial stormwater onto the ground at Hanford on a daily basis…

The permit would allow Energy to dump more than 2.1 million gallons of industrial wastewater onto the ground every day…"

lets look at it this way….The oceans of earth produce 70& of all its oxygen.That a fact.If we continue to contaminate the oceans with radioactivity we will kill the oceans…We will kill the food chain and we will eventually go back to an atmosphere which will be primarily methane…Is there intelligent methane breathing life out there? If so Earth may become its new home????
Just an idea? Maybe they will be kinder to earth than we were?

This guy has been tireless in his quest to tell people the truth about nuclear energy, and also warning people of the danger involved, especially with Fukushima and the Indian Point plant in NY, and you call him a jerk. I guess I could ask you how much activism YOU are involved in right now??

You can argue that half a truth is better than no truth at all. Or you can argue that he's a liar collecting nuke paychecks while he knows families have been dying for decades, and all he's doing is helping kick the can down the road so more people will die before anything is done about it, while his paymasters can build more death plants.

"… The leaks officials say , pose no immediate risk to the public health or safety… " We've all heard this one before. Just like there is just a " minimal " risk of cancer from fukushima. Clearly , other than those who have kept up on this issue, the general public is completely in the dark on how dangerous and how serious these problems are.

Can you imagine putting nuclear waste next to one of THE most important fresh water sources in the USA ? What FUCKING genius thought this one up ?

Maybe the same genius who put Nuke reactors on top of some of the most active fault zones in the world … Wow .. if it wasn't for the GENIUS of nuclear weaponry/power, the planet might stand a fighting chance at survival .. Sometimes you grow to big for your environment, and it looks like we humans are racing right for that outcome …

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